


Certain Sure

by rain_sleet_snow



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Prequel Trilogy
Genre: Ambiguous/Open Ending, BAMF Beru Whitesun, Coming of Age, Developing Relationship, During Canon, F/M, Female Friendship, Freedom, Gen, Hutts (Star Wars), Implied threat of non-con, Mentors, Mos Espa, Planet Tatooine (Star Wars), Politics, Resistance, Shmi Skywalker Deserves Better, Slavery, Tatooine Culture, Tatooine Slave Culture (Star Wars), Tusken Raiders (Star Wars), Women Being Awesome
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-01
Updated: 2020-11-01
Packaged: 2021-03-08 20:36:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,670
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27332791
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rain_sleet_snow/pseuds/rain_sleet_snow
Summary: Sometimes you just know, Pim has said to Beru,sometimes you can just tell. Shmi came to Pim to exchange her information for news of a younger sister, Merel, sold as a teenager to a shipping company, but though Pim had nothing for her and knew nothing of Shmi at all, Pim still said:stay, rest a while.And from that first meeting have grown many things, none of which Shmi Skywalker or Pim Whitesun ever discuss openly, some of which Beru may - in time - inherit. But right now she will make tea.
Relationships: Anakin Skywalker & Beru Whitesun, Anakin Skywalker & Shmi Skywalker, Beru Whitesun & Her Mother, Cliegg Lars/Shmi Skywalker, Owen Lars/Beru Whitesun, Shmi Skywalker & Beru Whitesun, Shmi Skywalker & Beru's Mother
Comments: 20
Kudos: 109





	Certain Sure

**Author's Note:**

> I wrote this for Beru Appreciation Day, prompt Beru & Shmi, but it is late. 
> 
> With thanks to stitchingatthecircuitboard for the beta & advice.

There are a lot of connections between the slaves and the free of Mos Espa that go unmentioned, and some of them are more dangerous secrets than others. Pim Whitesun's late evening visit to Shmi Skywalker falls into the _more dangerous_ category, and even as she walks into the slave quarter with her teenaged daughter, Beru feels eyes on them both.

Beru doesn't let her hands tighten on the strap of her bag; her mother's face keeps calm and placid even as someone watching lets a shutter bang behind them. This is just a routine visit to one of the best cunning women in Mos Espa. Pim Whitesun visits every time she comes into town to exchange medicines and advice. Sometimes she trades in food, or supplies Shmi can distribute among her community. Shmi has her ear to the ground, and can advise on the Hutts' latest movements. She's a valuable connection to have, even for a prosperous farmer's wife. And Beru is a good clever girl, according to Pim's neighbours. They approve of Pim's little shadow. They say it's smart of Pim to introduce Beru to her network now; the girl is quick enough and level-headed enough to run the household when she leaves school.

It goes without saying that Pim's visits have nothing to do with the desert's secret roads to freedom, and that Pim has no ties to Shmi besides their black-market professional acquaintance. In theory Pim hasn't heard anything about the disappearance of Anakin Skywalker, whisked away by the Jedi and a queen to the suns only know where. And if Pim did know already, she'd be sorry for Shmi, but not surprised. That's what happens to slave mothers' children. At least young Anakin is lucky: he's free. Shmi probably won't see him again, but he's free.

Pim drops the pretence as soon as Shmi closes the front door behind them, as quickly as Shmi sheds the deference meant for the watchers outside. 

"What the hell happened here?"

Shmi leans back against her closed front door and lets her eyes slip shut as she sighs. "It's been quite a week. Beru, put the kettle on, will you?"

Beru sets her bag down and walks through to the small kitchen. She's been here often enough before to notice that things have changed: very few of Anakin's belongings remain, and those that do have been arranged so that they are easy to sweep out of sight at a moment's notice.

Beru is in the same school year as the youngest Darklighter boy, and the teacher doesn't know about the encrypted chat channels they use when they're distance learning. Toba said that word on the street was Watto was _furious_ about the loss and the Hutts were in an uproar about Ani Skywalker overturning the rigged race and getting bought up by a Jedi - the very last thing the Hutts wanted to make planetfall. Watto's anger would explain why Anakin's things are partly hidden, and why Shmi's workshop is so much more full of piecework than usual. Watto isn't a beating master. He has other ways of expressing his displeasure.

Beru swallows hard. It's an acceptable risk, here where no-one can see her. 

She sets the kettle boiling, careful not to use more water than necessary: Shmi didn't mention her rations had been restricted, but it's clear enough, and this soon after Anakin's disappearance she will still be closely monitored. Offering her more would be too big a risk for all of them.

Shmi isn't originally from the Mos Espa area, and the tea she makes is more heavily spiced than the blend Beru is used to, heavy on the tongue rather than green and sharp. It's not easy to come by the ingredients, so Beru spoons it out sparingly. It comes east from the mountain foothills where Shmi was born, along with what little news Shmi has of her few remaining siblings, and what little Pim knows of her cousins who are still enslaved. Shmi came east before Beru was born, carrying names on her lips and messages sewn into the seams of her skirts, and there she found Pim Whitesun: free daughter of a free mother, but not without memory. Or connections.

_Sometimes you just know_ , Pim has said to Beru, _sometimes you can just tell_ . Shmi came to Pim to exchange her information for news of a younger sister, Merel, sold as a teenager to a shipping company, but though Pim had nothing for her and knew nothing of Shmi at all, Pim still said: _stay, rest a while_. 

And from that first meeting have grown many things, none of which Shmi Skywalker or Pim Whitesun ever discuss openly, some of which Beru may - in time - inherit. But right now she will make tea.

Beru brews the tea in a pot, and carries it and three cups back to her mother and Shmi. Neither the pot nor any of the cups match, nor are they the ones that Shmi brought east. Gardulla's overseer, Anakin confided once in that piercing little-boy whisper, liked to smash things. The more personal the better.

Shmi and Pim are talking quietly. A slip of flimsi changes hands. Beru wouldn’t have seen it if she hadn’t known what to look for. She keeps quiet about it, and sets the tray carefully down on the table. Shmi is the head of this household of one: she checks the pot, and pours tea for them.

“Very sudden, your son’s departure,” says Pim.

“Very,” Shmi says, and sips at her tea. “With his talents… I thought waiting would be too great a risk. Especially since now _everyone_ knows.”

Nerves shudder up Beru’s spine. Ani has always been... quick, in a strange sort of way. A little bit faster, a little bit sharper, a little bit luckier; he is never in the way when things are thrown or shot, and he always knows what’s happening just a second before it does. And of course, as the entire system knows now, he flies like his veins run with coaxium. But if the Jedi took him, he isn't just quick, he's a Jedi - and for all Beru’s grounding in the religions of the Force is limited to a single class two years ago that she spent drawing elaborate spider diagrams and listening to the teacher with half an ear, she knows the stories. Jedi have capabilities that no-one else does. They read minds, they wield swords of light, they lift things without touching them and heal without bacta.

How valuable would Ani be, to the Hutts? How much must Gardulla be cursing the bet she’d made with Watto when Ani was little, the one that had lost both Shmi and Ani to the junk dealer?

How much must _Watto_ be regretting that he didn’t charge a higher price for Ani?

“There are other risks there,” Pim says delicately, and Beru keeps her eyes on her tea and says nothing.

Nobody knows who Ani’s father was. Shmi won’t say. Or she’ll say, _there was no father_ , which she has told Pim is literally true, but which is also - it’s a very particular form of words. Beru has cousins she’s never met who have no fathers, but they didn’t come to life with the light of the suns, either. Still, the whole of Mos Espa knows who Ani’s mother was, and they may think that if Shmi had one Jedi son, she can have a second.

Shmi can’t have more children, she saw to that herself, and one of her most valuable services is ensuring the same for other women, but there will be people who don’t know that - or don’t believe it. 

“I’m not worried,” Shmi says.

It might be true. She might have her own protection that she doesn’t choose to divulge right now, or she might be preparing to flee. Shmi has walked close to the sandstorms before, even Beru knows that, and there are a series of plans in permanent readiness in case Shmi has to cut and run, but Shmi has always refused to leave her community or to risk her son. The roads across the desert are not easy for children, and the dangers of pursuit are many. Less than they were now that Shmi is not owned by the most powerful Hutt on the continent, but not negligible.

Pim and Shmi hold each other’s eyes for a moment, and Pim blinks first. She nods, just faintly. Pim will be found dead in a gully if the wrong people figure out what she’s been doing all her life, but Shmi’s the one taking the biggest risks, and she knows them better than anyone else.

“Let us hope the winds will bring you home to Anakin,” Pim says, sipping at her tea.

“Oh, I doubt it,” Shmi says, smiling sadly, but there’s something - just something -

Beru watches Shmi’s face, and _knows_ that Shmi doesn’t doubt it at all. She knows, as well as she knows her own name, that Shmi believes Anakin will return - or that she will leave, and find him. 

Shmi catches her eye, and for a second her smile shifts; then it returns, warmer and truer. “What does your heart tell you, Beru?”  
  


Pim blinks, and Beru turns over her words in her head.

  
“Nothing out loud,” Beru replies, and both adults laugh.

  
  


Shmi doesn’t go anywhere. Pim and Beru continue to visit, the same way they usually would. Over the months, the community’s watchfulness diminishes. Shmi clearly doesn’t intend to flee, or at least not immediately; and she hasn’t been taken. Beru thinks there are discussions happening over her head about that, people coming and going at strange hours of the day, but whatever is going on is too important and too delicate for Beru to be let in on it. She trusts that judgement, and doesn’t ask questions. 

Shmi acts like nothing has changed. She doesn’t talk about Anakin, and she doesn’t encourage others to talk about him, which suggests she thinks that wherever the Jedi took him he is now free. Slaves don’t mention free kindred; it gives the masters ideas.

She does start mentioning a man called Cliegg Lars. Not often, and usually only in passing. Beru knows the Lars family, also in passing - her mother knew Cliegg Lars’ late wife, and he has a son a couple of years older than her, just old enough to be in the class above her at school, until he finished his basic education at sixteen and decided not to carry on. She’s crossed paths with Owen once or twice. He’s friendly enough, but girls of fifteen are of little interest to grown men, and Owen is reserved. He and his father have a moisture farm out beyond Mos Eisley, close to the edge of the wild Jundland Wastes, and a place like that takes a lot of taking care of.

Beru realises quickly enough that her mother has a stake in the Lars farm, as a refuge and a shelter for runaways taking the road across the desert. She’s less clear whether that’s how Shmi met Cliegg. It seems, when she stops by one morning to pick up some memory boards that Shmi refurbished for Beru’s father and bumps into Cliegg there, that he comes by a lot. Or at least that’s the impression Watto gives.

The old Toydarian still grumbles a lot, and he’s still overworking Shmi like she can make up for the hole his gambling addiction makes in his profits, but he’s far from stupid. Beru only has to catch a glimpse of Shmi and Cliegg together, and hear a few seconds of conversation, to know he’s only missed one thing.

Cliegg hangs on Shmi’s words like each one is a pearl. And Shmi is as wary as ever, but she likes him enough to spare a smile for him. Which is a lot, under the circumstances.

“We’re going to be seeing a lot more of Cliegg, I think,” Beru says to her mother when she gets home with the memory boards.

“Maybe,” Pim says, dubious. But Beru is not dissuaded.

Looking at Watto’s unfocused eyes when she passes by, Beru knows he won’t be keeping his business that long. And that means he won’t be keeping Shmi all that long, since she is, after all, an asset. Beru has been steeped in the injustices of the world she lives in since she was a child, but sometimes, some things will slap her in the face and cut as they do. The reminder that Shmi can be thrown away on Watto’s addled word is… bitter.

Beru doesn’t know why she’s so upset now. She has always known this. It has always been the background of her life.

“It’s because you’re young,” Shmi says.

Beru is seventeen and not sure about that.

Shmi laughs.

“I know about Watto,” she says. “I think I have a year.”

“Six months,” Beru says. The words come from her mouth like they belong to a stranger.

  
  


Five and a half months later the Marstrap family, who have a cousin that dances at Gardulla’s court, pick up credible rumours of Gardulla sniffing round Shmi. The only wonder, to Pim, is that it's taken so long; maybe Gardulla hopes to get a better price now Watto is desperate. Beru asks her mother why they haven’t pulled Shmi out already.

“Shmi has her own plans and she knows more about them than either of us do,” Pim says. 

Beru sits on her hands.

“You can do the laundry if you’re so eager to be moving.”  
  
Beru does the laundry, and tosses and turns all night, and wakes up in the morning and logs in to distance school for the specialised classes she can’t take nearby, and Toba Darklighter has already left five excitable messages on their encrypted comm channel which have Beru so distracted she almost misses registration. Once she’s done the bare minimum to prove she’s there and submit her homework, she rips off her headset and bolts for her mother.

She’s not supposed to do this: she’s supposed to stay quiet and calm and unflappable, and one day maybe she will be, but today she tracks down her mother in the kitchen, bolts the door shut, and bursts out: “Cliegg Lars has bought Shmi.”

“Huh,” Pim Whitesun says, putting down the blender she’s cleaning. “I told you she had plans.”

“But he _bought her_ ,” Beru says, “and he _likes_ her, and -”

There’s more than one kind of slavery, and not all routes out are safe. Cliegg Lars is a good man, Beru thinks; she keeps seeing him drop by the shop in Mos Eisley, and if it’s not him it’s his son. They both treat Shmi with the same respect they treat Beru, the free eldest daughter of a well-established farmer. But Beru’s judgement is not always apt, and good men who are ignorant have failed to appreciate power dynamics before. There are likely things Cliegg does not know, no matter who he’s been sheltering in his cellars, or leaving water stashes for in the desert. Things no-one would have risked telling him.

“You make a good point,” Pim allows. “But I haven’t got this far by not trusting Shmi’s judgement. We’ll visit.” She arches an eyebrow at Beru. “Don’t you have class?”

Beru bites back a curse and runs back to her station. She has missed two questions from the teacher, but thankfully he only gives her extra homework. She does that in the passenger seat of the speeder as her mother drives them both out to the Lars farm; the work shouldn’t have taken her long, and it’s a good two-hour journey, but Beru keeps getting distracted by the desert dunes out here, and far in the distance the looming Wastes.

“Beautiful, isn’t it,” Pim says. “Dangerous things often are.”  
  
Beru murmurs a distracted reply and types her last few answers out hastily on her datapad as the Lars farm comes into view.

The Lars family doesn’t entertain a lot, not since Omari died; Pim’s working theory is that Cliegg found it easiest to bear his grief in silence. Beru has only been by once or twice in her life, but even she can see the difference, now that Shmi has moved in. Of course the place is no longer hung in undyed cloth, as it was for Omari’s wake, but more than that, it’s brighter and more furnished than Beru had ever seen it. There are actual plants in the kitchen. After a moment’s staring, Beru recognises them as the ones Shmi’s tea is made of. 

Shmi has her own room, on the opposite side of the courtyard from Cliegg’s, and she looks happy there as she gives Beru and Pim a tour of the farm, pointing out landmarks, showing them the layout of the house. She makes a point of giving Beru and Pim tea in her room, sitting on the low seats that are new, admiring the bright rug that Shmi has brought in. Cliegg is working on the farm, with Owen.

The first thing Shmi does is show Beru and Pim her bill of sale, and her emancipation papers. They were made out within hours of each other; Cliegg must have taken Shmi straight from Watto to the notary. The sum he paid isn’t a small one. Notaries charge, too. Cliegg is known to be careful with his money and he runs a profitable farm, but he must have planned this for a long time to be sure of affording it.

It’s notable that the papers are in Shmi’s possession. She has her own locked safe for them and it’s bolted to the wall and only she, she tells them, has the combination.

Pim’s eyebrows rise up her forehead and then settle. Beru feels relief bubbling in her gut.

“And the year and a day?” Pim says.

Beru carefully doesn’t hold her breath. That’s the rule, though Cliegg might not know it; someone who frees a slave can’t offer them love, or at least a formal relationship, until a year and a day have passed from the slave’s emancipation, whether it’s won through battle or subterfuge or cold hard cash. It’s about not being trapped. It’s about not being obliged. It’s important - Beru has known that since long before anyone offered to explain it to her.

“He’ll respect it,” Shmi says, and there’s a candlelit warmth to her smile that Beru has not seen before. “Actually, he brought it up, and told me he thought I knew what was in his heart, but that he wouldn’t be saying a word until a year and a day had passed.”

“Hmm,” Pim says.

  
“He values freedom,” Shmi says. There’s the tiniest, telling pause before she adds: “of choice.”

They start talking about food instead, and all the things Shmi wants to cook now she’s no longer on Watto’s heavily restricted allowance, which got smaller as his gambling addiction bit deeper. A few minutes later, Beru excuses herself to go and find the bathroom.

She bumps into Owen on the way, coming back in from the eastern vaporators. He smiles at her. 

“Beru, right?”

She nods. “And you’re Owen.”

  
He runs a hand through his hair. “Yes. You’re here to see Shmi? She was happy you and Madam Whitesun were coming over.” 

  
“She’s a good friend,” Beru says. “She and my mother are quite close.” 

  
It’s safe to say that, now that Shmi’s a freedwoman. And clearly going to stay a freedwoman, if Cliegg and Owen get their way.

“She’s very kind,” Owen says. “And I’ve never seen anyone quite as quick as she is with a droid. Have you met that protocol droid she and her son made? Amazing.”

Beru smiles. “I know C-3P0.” She shifts from foot to foot. “I was looking for the bathroom?”

Owen points it out.

He’s got nice eyes, Beru thinks, as she hurries over. They’re a nice shade of blue, and when they smile, he looks much friendlier.

She gets the idea she’ll be seeing him at the wedding, which - she also gets the idea - will be in very slightly more than a year and a day.

  
  


Owen gets her number. They chat, sometimes. Bump into each other, occasionally; he comes into town more often, possibly on the chance of seeing her. The Lars farm is closest to the Darklighters’, and Toba says he doesn’t remember Owen being that social before - but if Beru invites him along, Owen will show up, and he has a good time when he talks to people, however long it takes him to get started. He left school to run his father’s farm, but he likes to listen to her talk about her studies, and when he asks her what she wants to do with her life, she feels like he’s really interested.

“Lars men clearly have attractions I wasn’t aware of,” Pim observes, when she finds Owen and Beru deep in conversation by the Whitesun family speeder in Mos Eisley. 

Owen blushes red to the ears. 

“Owen helped me carry the shopping over,” Beru says, hopefully a little more composed. 

“You’ve always been such a helpful lad,” Pim says. Beru’s mother has an evil streak. Shmi has often remarked on it.

“I do my best,” Owen says, and removes himself from the scene immediately. Beru glares at her mother. She wasn’t done talking to him.

“If he’s frightened of me, my sweet, he won’t be able to handle you,” Pim informs her. 

Clearly he can handle Beru, and he’s not all that frightened of Pim, because only about a day later Beru gets a message inviting her to watch the podracing in Beggar’s Canyon. It’s a local race, the kind of thing people go to with friends to drink and picnic and laugh, and it gets a frisson of danger from the fact that it takes place at sunset.

And also that it’s podracing in Beggar’s Canyon. There’s a very decent chance someone will die.

Beru tells her parents she’s going - when her siblings are out of the room, to avoid mockery - and they exchange glances.

“Owen Lars is a good lad,” her father says finally. “I like him.”

“He’s an excellent shot,” Pim says. “You can go, Beru, but only if you take your own rifle. And if raiders show up, don’t be a hero. Get out of there. You have responsibilities, remember.”

She does. It’s not just schoolwork, housework and Owen Lars keeping her busy. Beru nods, and tells Owen he can pick her up at five. It won’t be awkward, because Beru has very carefully ensured that everyone else will be somewhere totally different.

His eyebrows go up when he sees the rifle slung over her back, and he grins. “Do you think you’ll need to shoot me?”

  
“It was a condition of my coming with you,” Beru explains, more awkward than she’d like to be. “But I think it’s only meant for Tusken Raiders.” 

  
“Fair,” Owen says. He’s also armed. And he’s brought the other half of their picnic.

They’re set up comfortably well in advance of the race, sitting on the hood of the speeder with a blanket under them and a picnic around them. Owen’s shoulder is the perfect height for her to lean her head on. She can’t see anyone she knows, but she knows the Marstrap twins were planning on coming, which means everyone will know by tomorrow that Beru Whitesun showed up to the big race on a date with Owen Lars. She wonders if the rifles will make it into the rumours.

  
She wouldn’t be here if she minded people knowing, anyway.

“You do a lot of work with Shmi, I heard,” Owen says, when they’ve settled into a comfortable quiet, sharing flatbread and a dip Shmi makes that comes from the same place her tea does. Beru never feels like she has to perform for Owen, which is a relief, given how many layers of her life and others’ depend on her telling perfect lies for the rest of her life - or however long it takes to overthrow the Hutts, whichever comes first.

Beru hums. “Did she tell you that?” 

“Not in so many words,” Owen says, and that’s how Shmi would have put it; that’s how Shmi talks.

“Did she tell your dad as well?”

  
“He already knew.” 

  
Of course he did, Beru thinks, and thinks about all the caves in the Jundland Wastes and how not all of them contain Tusken Raiders, especially the ones accessible from the Lars farm on foot. She’d bet that Owen knows where to find all of them, except she doesn’t make bets she knows she will lose.

“I could’ve guessed,” Owen says awkwardly. “I know how brave you are.”

  
She laughs, and leans her cheek against his shoulder. He tilts his head in towards hers, and if she looks up, it’ll be a kiss. She doesn’t; not yet.

“Do you think things will ever change?” Owen says quietly, as the suns slip towards the horizon. Floodlights are burning down in the canyon already, and she knows what Owen’s really asking. The knife-edge every farmer lives on, the still-fresh pink scar on Shmi’s leg where her tracker was removed.

Beru breathes in, breathes out, and asks herself what she really, truly thinks. “Yes,” she says at last. “They will.”

  
“You sound sure,” Owen says, almost taken aback. 

“I am sure,” she says, and tips her head up and kisses him.

  
  


Before Anakin Skywalker blows into town, trailing a senator and nightmares and the restless crackle of ozone that catches Beru's breath and makes Owen tense from toes to shoulders, Beru has a perfectly ordinary day at the Lars farm. She’s driven over to visit: not for work this time, but to help Shmi with the canning, and to see Owen. 

Not that Beru needs an excuse to see Owen, not really. It's not like her parents don't approve, or like Cliegg minds. He was alone for a long time, just him and Owen on the farm, and now with Shmi and Beru around more often he says he feels like there's some life back in the place. Beru thinks it's just that her sweetheart and prospective father-in-law are too used to spending their days in friendly silence, and forgot the benefits of actually talking to each other. Owen would be silent and gruff all the time, if she'd let him.

But he smiles for her, and Beru smiles back, and Shmi smiles at them both.

"It's very convenient," Shmi teases sometimes, "having you in the house." Nobody asks any questions about Beru visiting her sweetheart and in-laws, for obvious reasons, and even the Hutts' local enforcer jokes with Owen about how besotted his little girlfriend is, and with Cliegg about young love. Beru blushes and Shmi tuts jokingly, and they both carry off a number of plans previously considered dangerously bold. It's a shield that will eventually wear thin, of course, but every life they can save in the meantime counts. 

"Am I your daughter-in-law or your live-in conspirator?" Beru retorts every time Shmi makes the same joke. Shmi laughs and shakes her shoulder gently, or kisses the top of her head; she's reserved, careful with affection, and every time Owen sees this undisputed proof that Shmi has decided Beru is part of her family he tries and fails to hide his smile.

Beeu spends a distracting amount of time thinking about Owen's smile. They haven't set a date for the wedding yet, but next harvest time seems about right.

Today she has no special plans, other than to help Shmi with the canning and distract Owen from his farmwork. It's a nice, cool day, cool enough that they can sit out in the courtyard late into the morning and work there, skinning fruit and packing it into jars of vinegar and aromatics. Monotonous work, but with company, it's comforting. Beru knows the rhythm of it well, and she's used to sharing it with Shmi. Shmi's hands are quick and sure, and she talks in her warm rolling voice telling stories to pass the time, teaching Beru words of a language she doesn't name here and there, tossing in whole sentences to see if Beru can understand them. It's a test, but it's also a privilege. Pim speaks Sthira, as does Beru’s grandmother. But Beru’s grandmother did not pass it on: Pim learned elsewhere. Pim, free daughter of a free mother, earned the privilege of speaking it by her work. And now Beru is learning from Shmi.

She still feels awed when she thinks about that, though she and Shmi don't talk about it, not in any language at all.

Shmi talks about Anakin, around Anakin. Beru remembers him, of course, from their shared childhood: their acquaintance so short and his departure so memorable that the memory of him is fixed in amber, more a story than a reality. She doubts whether Anakin remembers her at all, wherever he is, assuming he’s alive. He was so young when the Jedi left with him that he probably only has fuzzy memories of Tatooine, and probably most of those are of his mother, or Kitster, or Watto, or C-3P0.

C-3P0 brings them drinks. Shmi thanks him absent-mindedly, and starts talking again, telling a story about a trickster god that could fly on the wings of the desert wind. Beru remembers this one. Shmi likes to tell it, and it has a rhythm in her voice, like she has told it many, many times before. 

Anakin wanted to see every planet in the galaxy, Beru remembers. 

The canning is done by the lunch hour, and Owen is leaning against a wall watching them finish up, and smiling at Beru under his eyelashes. Cliegg has come in and started poking at whatever Shmi set to cooking earlier; he’s an able cook, but he’s still learning his way around Shmi’s recipes, which are all to taste, and which never taste quite right when Shmi doesn’t cook them. Shmi hurries inside to rescue lunch from him, and Beru peels the last feijoa - a little too bruised to can - and cuts it deftly into slices, discarding the bruises. She slips half into her mouth, and holds the rest to Owen’s lips, holds his eyes as he takes the fruit from her. 

“I could use a hand,” she says, and her voice is scratchier than she necessarily had in mind. One of Owen’s broad hands curls around her waist, and he hums a soft enquiry.

“I meant with carrying the cans in,” Beru explains, and laughs hysterically at the look on his face.

They are not visible from the kitchen window, but lunch nonetheless comes with a side of merciless teasing, and Shmi makes a point of telling Beru that the guest bedroom is made up _if you need it, dear_. 

Beru does not need the guest bedroom, and she isn’t going to sleep through the afternoon rest hour, either. Neither is Owen.

“You need your rest,” she says, closing Owen’s bedroom door behind them. It’s much tidier than it used to be, visibly a shared room, and there are things of hers scattered about, not forgotten so much as strategically left behind. “I shouldn’t distract you from it.”  
  


“Sure,” Owen says, rolling his eyes so hard she laughs. The shutters are already closed against the heat; he pulls the curtains too, and crosses the room to take her in his arms. “Distract me,” he says, drawing pins from her hair as he kisses her, and she makes a noise he elicits from her far too often and leans hard into his chest, hands knotted in his shirt. “Whatever. Come to bed, starlight.”

When she does get up, some time later, it’s because she wants water and the pitcher in Owen’s room is empty. She leaves him sleeping and dresses herself only in shirt and trousers, and wanders out of his room with her hair loose on her shoulders, taking the pitcher with her. It’s still hot out, but most of the heat has leaked out of the day. 

Beru leaves the pitcher filling under the tap, and steps out into the courtyard to get an idea of the weather. If it’s too hot she may be better off waiting till tomorrow to ride home; by the time it’s cool enough, it may well be dark out. The Tuskens are coming closer and closer to Anchorhead lately - the Darklighter boys shot at a raiding party and just about escaped with their lives two weeks ago - and Beru doesn’t fancy being caught out alone.

The sight of Shmi, fully dressed and loading a speeder, puts the pitcher right out of her mind. 

“Shmi! Where are you going?”

“To pick mushrooms,” Shmi says, apparently taken by surprise. “If we’ll be four for dinner than we need more than I’ve got.”  
  


“Wait.” Beru darts back into the kitchen to turn the tap off, and hurries back outside. “Where are you planning to find mushrooms?” It’s one of the things drilled into her since her earliest childhood: always tell someone where you are going, always say when you’ll be back.

“The north-western vaporators always have a good crop,” Shmi says, and Beru’s heart does an uncomfortable double-thump. She knows the Lars farm very well now, and the north-western vaporators are extremely close to the Jundland Wastes - which is where the Raiders were lurking, going on the last, best information that anyone has.

“Beru,” Shmi says. “It’s the middle of the day. I’ll be back in half an hour. It’s fine.”

But no, Beru knows. No, it isn’t.

“Wait for me, at least,” she says. “Wait for me and Owen. I’ll wake him up now. Don’t go by yourself - please, Shmi.”

Shmi opens her mouth to choose - and in the single second before the world splits in half, Beru holds her breath.


End file.
